The other night, the wifey and I ransacked Office Max armed with a 15% off everything you could stuff in a shopping bag that we got in the mail, and put a significant dent in my weekly spending budget by purchasing an entire new collection of drawing utensils. My NY resolution was to get back into drawing after a disappointing 10+ year hiatus. For Christmas, Kir got me the very Bamboo Wacom Tablet that I've been wanting. It fits perfect with my laptop. Combine that with the $150 I dropped at Office Max and I'd say it's a safe bet to expect to see some more creativity coming from my brain than has been for what seems quite a while.

I started dooding some characatures of some of my friends around the music scene. One started to develop a little. Johnny Volume, a friend, and the DJ at our wedding, seemed to have the physical traits that were easy to capture with various shapes.

This was just for fun. Something to mess around with when I'm supposed to be working on things that play no importance in my creative life. I'm really excited about getting back into the swing of drawing again. My life used to be engulfed in pencil shavings and paint splatters, but the web ended up completely diverting most of my attention. I'm eager to focus on merging the two together better than I have been.

Last week, an editorial team shooting photos for a book featuring people all over the world who have the iconic "Bars" from the 80's hardcore band Black Flag (Barred For Life) stopped in AZ to take some photos at a show. I posted the press release on AZPunk.com, and it sparked a spontaneous tattoo idea for me.

Author Stewart Ebersole explains in the press release that, "The band's logo, four staggered, parallel rectangles known simply as "The Bars", is one of the most enduring and vivid symbols of youth subculture." A subculture that I have personally devoted over 17 years of blood, sweat and tears to. A subculture that flourished in my mind, heart and principals since the day I picked up a pair of drumsticks.

Instead of the actual logo's four black bars, I decided to use the actual two sets of drumsticks that represented the very beginning of my love for American punk rock and hardcore; my black graphite drumsticks and quad mallets I used all throughout my high school band career.

I started playing drums in 5th grade, but didn't actually fully develop as a drummer until my exposure to high school band life. High school is where I spent four years a not just a member of the jazz, marching, and concert band ensembles, but lead Central High School's marching band as the Drum line Captain from 93-96. The more time I spent learning the disciplines of being the rhythm portion of these huge ensembles, equaled the ferocity of the storm that blasted through every muscle as I learned to play along with bands like Dead Kennedys, Rage Against The Machine, and Bad Religion in my own spare time. Much to my mother's dismay, the aggressive punk rock seed had been planted, and there was no way it was going to die.

23 years from picking up that first pair of drumsticks, 17 years of punk debauchery, 5 punk bands and almost 8 years of AZPunk.com later, this was one tattoo that just had to be done. Although I didn't end up participating in the Barred For Life photo shoot or going to the show, that wasn't too important to me. This was:

It has been ages since I picked up a pencil and drew something. The only doodling I usually do these days, are sketches of website layouts or logo designs. Hardly the detailed drawings of my youth. So when an old work colleague of mine asked me to illustrate a logo for his gaming studio company, I was excited for a drawing challenge. I knew the best way to attack this was to dust off the ol' pencil and grease up the elbow.

Because at the time I lacked a real scanner, I had to use my next best thing; my phone's camera. I sketched up a few little characters based off the client's expectations, took a picture, and tossed it into Illustrator.

This was a fun little job, and my friend was very happy with the outcome. Here was his final logo choice.

Behold, the new TKOD logo. It is all-powerful, and it is good. It visually accommodates the rich, and vibrantly intellectual content you will find on this exalting sanctuary on the innernets. As if I were God himself, my unequivocal brain power compiled elements from the earth and water, and compiled my creation as if to tell the world, "Fear no more! For I have broughteth upon Man the website that will deliver all of the world from work boredom and bring them together under the banner of justice, truth, and all things that are geek that I have the time and/or patience to write about."

Come with me my children, join my world and place thy banner upon thy own personal website, so that I may gain a cult of followers that truly believe all of God's greatness lays not only in my written words, but the advertising links that so gracefully dances across each page.

The Trapper Keeper is good. All glorify it in thy name. Amen.

copy me!

A friend of mine, Vil Vodka from Anti-Snob.com, has spent the last several years composing a documented history on Phoenix's punk scene. He's done an AMAZING job on this, and was rad enough to post some of it on AZPunk.com. The article features a clip of T.S.O.L. performing Darker My Love at Mad Gardens in '83.

Upon reading this article, my friend/client/old-school-local-punk-muthafucka, Tom Lopez, emailes me additional clips featuring J.F.A. from this very same Mad Gardens show. I guess he was the one who leaked the video online. He details this long story of how his friend, Greg Heins (drummer of old 602 punk band Mighty Sphincter) let him borrow the tape to watch it, and Tom subsequently made copies. It kinda sounded like Greg wasn't a big fan of the videos being out for some reason, but does it really matter anyway? Besides, it's history. You can't bogart history.

A couple months ago, a punk band from Illinois, Slow Form of Suicide, hit me up looking for a show out here around mid-October. I figured, it'd been a while since I booked a show, so I hit up locals The Tightholes, Cagematch, and E.C.V., talked to Tyler over at Jugheads, and short of double booking the date, these guys will be lucky enough to be playing with oldschool metal/punks, The Accused and Javelina on Wednesday October 14th.

Since I wouldn't even think of calling myself anything of an illustrator these days (I's been a really, really long time since I've sat down and drawn. I know, I need to get back into that...), I hit up my buddies, and old Spawn co-workers, Tyler Jeffers and Joe Ferstl. I asked them to come up with something of the Madballs/Rat Fink nature, and as always, they delivered with colorful, gooey elegance.

Jeffers illustrated the eye, and Ferstl was on the Fink. I had no idea how I was going to end up designing the rest of the flyer once the art was in-hand, but for this project, it wasn't something I really wanted to plan for. Usually, I'm pretty meticulous about planning/sketching out my designs, but since I wanted the illustration artwork to be the main focus, I wanted to see what the illustrations themselves instructed me to do. Naturally, the artwork turned out awesome, so all I had to do was toss in some corresponding colors, place the show details, and boom! Kick ass show flyer. Big thanks, also, to Randy & Shane over at Think! Graphics in Tempe for hooking up some sweet-ass prints!